The Birth of Britain Quotes

“And wherever men are fighting against barbarism, tyranny, and massacre, for freedom, law, and honour, let them remember that the fame of their deeds, even though they themselves be exterminated, may perhaps be celebrated as long as the world rolls round.”
― Winston S. Churchill, Birth Of Britain, 55 B.C. To 1485

“No one can understand history without continually relating the long periods which are constantly mentioned to the experiences of our own short lives. Five years is a lot. Twenty years is the horizon to most people. Fifty years is antiquity. To understand how the impact of destiny fell upon any generation of men one must first imagine their position and then apply the time-scale of our own lives. Thus nearly all changes were far less perceptible to those who lived through them from day to day than appears when the salient features of an epoch are extracted by the chronicler. We peer at these scenes through dim telescopes of research across a gulf of nearly two thousand years. We cannot doubt that the second and to some extent the third century of the Christian era, in contrast with all that had gone before and most that was to follow, were a Golden Age for Britain. But by the early part of the fourth century shadows had fallen upon this imperfect yet none the less tolerable society. By steady, persistent steps the sense of security departed from Roman Britain. Its citizens felt by daily experience a sense that the world-wide system of which they formed a partner province was in decline.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Age of Revolution

“The foundation of the Germanic system was blood and kin.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invaders’ hearth.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“King Alfred’s Book of Laws, or Dooms, as set out in the existing laws of Kent, Wessex, and Mercia, attempted to blend the Mosaic code with Christian principles and old Germanic customs. He inverted the Golden Rule. Instead of “Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”, he adopted the less ambitious principle, “What ye will that other men should not do to you, that do ye not to other men”, with the comment, “By bearing this precept in mind a judge can do justice to all men; he needs no other law-books. Let him think of himself as the plaintiff, and consider what judgment would satisfy him.” The King, in his preamble, explained modestly that “I have not dared to presume to set down in writing many laws of my own, for I cannot tell what will meet with the approval of our successors.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Cold steel and discipline and the slight capital surplus necessary to move and organise armies constituted the sole defences.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“The Roman world, like an aged man, wished to dwell in peace and tranquillity and to enjoy in philosophic detachment the good gifts which life has to bestow upon the more fortunate classes. But new ideas disturbed the internal conservatism, and outside the carefully guarded frontiers vast masses of hungry, savage men surged and schemed. The essence of the Roman peace was toleration of all religions and the acceptance of a universal system of government. Every generation after the middle of the second century saw an increasing weakening of the system and a gathering movement towards a uniform religion. Christianity asked again all the questions which the Roman world deemed answered for ever, and some that it had never thought of.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“St Patrick was a Roman Briton of good family dwelling probably in the Severn valley.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“In Germany they had no kings. They developed them in Britain from leaders who claimed descent from the ancient gods.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“When York’s son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father’s cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Rome seemed as powerful and stable as ever. But below the surface the foundations were cracking, and through the fissures new ideas and new institutions were thrusting themselves. The cities are everywhere in decline; trade, industry, and agriculture bend under the weight of taxation. Communications are less safe, and some provinces are infested with marauders, peasants who can no longer”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“In our own fevered, changing, and precarious age, where all is in flux and nothing is accepted, we must survey with respect a period when, with only three hundred thousand soldiers, widespread peace in the entire known world was maintained from generation to generation, and when the first pristine impulse of Christianity lifted men’s souls to the contemplation of new and larger harmonies beyond the ordered world around them. The gift which Roman civilisation had to bestow was civic and political. Towns were planned in chessboard squares for communities dwelling under orderly government. The buildings rose in accordance with the pattern standardised throughout the Roman world. Each was complete with its forum, temples, courts of justice, gaols, baths, markets, and main drains. During the first century the builders evidently took a sanguine view of the resources and future of”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Agricola united a statesmanlike humanity. According to Tacitus (who had married his daughter), he proclaimed that “little is gained by conquest if followed by oppression”.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“The term ‘Whig’ had described a sour, bigoted, canting, money-grabbing Scots-Presbyterian. Irish Papist bandits ravaging estates and minor-houses had been called ‘Tories.’ Neither side was lacking in power of abuse… Yet the names Whig and Tory not only stuck, but became cherished and vaunted by those upon whom they were fastened. They gradually entered the whole life of the nation, and represented in successive forms its main temperamental types. They were adorned by memorable achievements for the welfare of England and both had their share in the expansion and greatness which were to come.”
― Winston Churchill, History of the English Speaking Peoples: Volume 1: The Birth of Britain

“Fuller, the seventeenth-century writer, wrote of Wyclif’s preachers, “These men were sentinels against an army of enemies until God sent Luther to relieve them.” In Oxford Wyclifite tradition lingered in Bible study until the Reformation.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Wyclif, who died in 1384, had appealed to the conscience of his age. Baffled, though not silenced, in England, his inspiration stirred a distant and little-known land, and thence disturbed Europe. Students from Prague had come to Oxford, and carried his doctrines, and indeed the manuscripts of his writings, to Bohemia. From this sprang the movement by which the fame of John Huss eclipsed that of his English master and evoked the enduring national consciousness of the Czech people.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“He wrote English tracts, of which the most famous was The Wicket, which were passed from hand to hand. Finally, with his students he took the tremendous step of having the Bible translated into English. “Cristen men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to salvacioun. …Each place of holy writ, both opyn and derk, techith mekenes and charite; and therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite hath the trewe undirstondyng and perfectioun of al holi writ. …Therefore no simple man of wit be aferd unmesurabli to studie in the text of holy writ… and no clerk be proude of the verrey undirstondyng of holy writ, for why undirstonding of hooly writ with outen charite that kepith Goddis [be]heestis, makith a man depper dampned… and pride and covetise of clerkis is cause of her blindnees and eresie, and priveth them fro verrey undirstondyng of holy writ.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“In the University of Oxford, the national centre of theological study and learning, criticism of Papal pretensions and power raised its voice. The arguments for reform set forth by a distinguished Oxford scholar named Wyclif attracted attention. Wyclif was indignant at the corruption of the Church, and saw in its proud hierarchy and absolute claims a distortion of the true principles of Christianity. He declared that dominion over men’s souls had never been delegated to mortals. The King, as the Vicar of God in things temporal, was as much bound by his office to curb the material lavishness of the clergy as the clergy to direct the spiritual life of the King. Though Pope and King was each in his sphere supreme, every Christian held not “in chief” of them, but rather of God. The final appeal was to Heaven, not to Rome.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Gunpowder, which we have seen used in the puny bombards which, according to some authorities, Edward had fired at Crécy and against Calais, was soon decisively to establish itself as a practical factor in war and in human affairs based on war. If cannon had not been invented the English mastery of the long-bow might have carried them even farther in their Continental domination.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“In the fifteenth century three Scottish universities were founded, St Andrew’s, Glasgow, and Aberdeen—one more than England had until the nineteenth century.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“One of the most famous stories of medieval chivalry tells how Sir James, the “Black” Douglas, for twenty years the faithful sword-arm of the Bruce, took his master’s heart to be buried in the Holy Land, and how, touching at a Spanish port, he responded to a sudden call of chivalry and joined the hard-pressed Christians in battle with the Moors. Charging the heathen host, he threw far into the mêlée the silver casket containing the heart of Bruce. “Forward, brave heart, as thou wert wont. Douglas will follow thee or die!” He was killed in the moment of victory.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“The Scots were unconquerable foes. It was not until 1305 that Wallace was captured, tried with full ceremonial in Westminster Hall, and hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. But the Scottish war was one in which, as a chronicler said, “every winter undid every summer’s work”. Wallace was to pass the torch to Robert Bruce.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“The structure of this army is curious. Every four men had a fifth man as leader; every nine men a tenth; every nineteen men a twentieth, and so on to every thousand; and it was agreed that the penalty for disobedience to the leader of any unit was death. Thus from the ground does freedom raise itself unconquerable.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“But over a century before she appeared an outlaw knight, William Wallace, arising from the recesses of South-West Scotland which had been his refuge, embodied, commanded, and led to victory the Scottish nation.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“Not until four centuries had elapsed was Oliver Cromwell by furtive contracts with a moneyed Israelite to open again the coasts of England to the enterprise of the Jewish race. It was left to a Calvinist dictator to remove the ban which a Catholic king had imposed.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“The rectors of Berkshire published a manifesto denying the right of Rome to tax the English Church, and urging that the Pope, like other bishops, should “live of his own”.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain

“In 1209 a Crusade for a different purpose was set on foot, and all temporal forces at the disposal of Rome were directed upon the Albigenses, under the leadership of Philip of France. At this time the burning of heretics and other undesirables, which had been practised sporadically in France, received the formal sanction of law.”
― Winston S. Churchill, The Birth of Britain